1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a print control system, a print control method, and a computer-readable storage medium, and more particularly, to those which are suitable for use in printing print data which has been impositioned by an application program.
2. Description of the Related Art
Conventionally, in a case where a print product such as a small booklet or a catalog is created in a simplified manner using a printer, two-sided printing is performed by generating document data which has been subjected to bookbinding imposition in advance. Then, the print product is folded in two by stapling (performing saddle stitching) in the middle of the print product by hand. The bookbinding imposition means to perform imposition so that pages of a document can be seen in a correct order in a twofold state.
Nowadays, product manuals or catalogs can be downloaded from manufacturer's web sites as Portable Document Format (PDF) data. Also, bookbinding impositioned data can be seen, as such PDF data.
On the other hand, multi-functional peripheral devices capable of performing not only printing of documents but also stapling have become common. Also, multi-functional peripheral devices capable of performing saddle-stitching or twofold as post-processing of printing are becoming more and more popular.
In printer drivers, a function of N-up imposition for performing imposition of images for N pages on a surface of one page has been included, and now a function of bookbinding imposition is included.
By performing printing after having set the function of bookbinding imposition by print settings of the printer driver, bookbinding impositioned printing can be performed by using the printer driver even on document data not-yet-bookbinding-impositioned. Furthermore, the document can be easily bound into a book by using the function of multi-functional peripheral device.
However, in a case where N-up impositioned document data or bookbinding impositioned document data is printed by using the printer driver, the printer driver recognizes only impositioned physical pages. For this reason, there has been a problem that printing or preview based on logical pages cannot be performed.
Further, various different functions of the printer driver may not be usable, or printing in a desirable form may not be able to be carried out in some cases. For example, when a function of adding page numbers is used, page numbers are added to physical pages instead of logical pages. In particular, when page numbers are added to the bookbinding impositioned document data, page numbers may become meaningless numbers, or rendering position of the page numbers may lie on a folding line, resulting in being useless.
Thus, Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2007-13799 discusses a technique for acquiring images of logical pages in accordance with imposition appearance from image data obtained by scanning paper sheets, and creating document file bound in the order of the logical pages.
However, in the technique discussed in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2007-13799, there is a problem that when imposition appearance of input data is designated, the input data is always divided in logical-page unit.
The printer driver itself has the functions of the bookbinding imposition and the N-up imposition, and thus the input data can be used as it is without dividing it in logical-page unit, depending on print settings of the output data. If the print data is divided in logical-page unit in a case where the input data can be used as it is, not only processing speed becomes slow, but also size of output data becomes large.